RHETORICS OF DISPLAY
Edited by Lawrence J. Prelli
Rhetorics of Display is a pathbreaking volume that brings together a distinguished
group of scholars to assess an increasingly pervasive form of rhetorical activity. Editor
Lawrence J. Prelli notes in his introduction that twenty-first century citizens continually confront displays of information and images, from the verbal images of speeches
and literature to visual images of film and photography to exhibits in museums to
the arrangement of our homes to the merchandising of consumer goods. The volume
provides an integrated, comprehensive study of the processes of selecting what to
reveal and what to conceal that together constitute the rhetorics of display. Surveying major historical transformations in the relationship between rhetoric and display,
this book also identifies the leading themes in relevant scholarship of the past three
decades.
Seventeen case studies canvass a representative and diverse range of displays—from
body piercing to a civil rights memorial to a Titanic exhibition to imagery found in
gambling casinos—and examine the ways that phenomena, persons, places, events,
identities, communities, and cultures are exhibited before audiences. Collectively the
contributors shed light on rhetorics that are nearly ubiquitous in contemporary communication and culture.
CONTRIBUTORS
John C. Adams • Jerry Blitefield • Phebe Shih Chao • Gregory Clark
John Nguyet Erni • James Michael Farrell • Victoria J. Gallagher
S. Michael Halloran • Robert Hariman • Gerard A. Hauser • Beverly James
Cheryl R. Jorgensen-Earp • John Louis Lucaites • Joshua Meyrowitz
Richard Morris • Lawrence J. Prelli • Lawrence W. Rosenfield • John Shotter
Mari Boor Tonn
Lawrence J. Prelli is an associate professor of communication, chair of the
Department of Communication, and
an affiliate associate professor in the
Department of Natural Resources at
the University of New Hampshire. He
is the author of A Rhetoric of Science:
Inventing Scientific Discourse, which
received the 1990 Eastern Communication Association’s Everett Lee Hunt
Award.
Studies in Rhetoric/Communication • Thomas W. Benson, series editor
May 2006, 443 pages, 44 illus.
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